JOSHUA RIFKIN

MAPLE LEAF RAG • THE ENTERTAINER

BETHENA • ROSE LEAF RAG

GLADIOLUS RAG • PINE APPLE RAG

COUNTRY CLUB • SOLACE

STOPTME RAG • MAGNETIC RAG

SATURDAY 25 JANUARY 2014 • 10 PM

This concert is part of the Nash Ensemble American Series

P I A N O

WIGMORE HALL

WIGMORE HALL • 36 Wigmore Street, London W1U 2BPJohn Gilhooly DirectorBox Office Tel: 020 7935 2141 • www.wigmore-hall.org.ukRegistered Charity No.1024838

Facilities for Disabled PeoplePlease contact House Management for details

Wigmore Hall is a no-smoking venue. No recording or photographic equipment may be takeninto the auditorium, or used in any other part of the Hall, without the prior written permissionof the management. Wigmore Hall is equipped with a Loop to help hearing aid users receiveclear sound without background noise. Patrons can use the facility by switching their hearingaids over to T. In accordance with the requirements of City of Westminster, persons shall not bepermitted to stand or sit in any of the gangways intersecting the seating, or to sit in any of theother gangways. If standing is permitted in the gangways at the sides and rear of the seating, itshall be limited to the number indicated in the notices exhibited in those positions.

The Nash Concert Society, a registered charity no. 255017, gratefullyacknowledges financial support for this concert from:

The Embassy of the United States of America in LondonWigmore Hall • Arts Council England • Friends of the Nash Ensemble

Joshua RifkinPiano Music of Scott Joplin (1868–1917)P R O G R A M M EPLEASE ENSURE THAT MOBILE PHONES ARE TURNED OFF

Would patrons also please stifle coughing as much as possible and ensure that watch alarms and any other electronic devices which can become audible are switched off.

MAPLE LEAF RAG (1899)THE ENTERTAINER – A RAGTIME TWO-STEP (1902)BETHENA – A CONCERT WALTZ (1905)ROSE LEAF RAG – A RAGTIME TWO-STEP (1907)GLADIOLUS RAG (1907)PINE APPLE RAG (1908)COUNTRY CLUB – A RAGTIME TWO-STEP (1909)SOLACE – A MEXICAN SERENADE (1909)STOPTIME RAG (1910)MAGNETIC RAG – SYNCOPATIONS CLASSIQUES (1914)

Scott JoplinBorn in the American Southwest andraised on the border of Texas andArkansas, Scott Joplin grew up in amusical home headed by a formerslave. He began to play the piano earlyand received some formal training –which he sought to augment throughouthis life – from a local music teacher. Inhis teens, he left home for the life of anitinerant musician, living and performing

in Chicago, St Louis, and elsewhere in the mid-West. The successof the Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, enabled him to giveup touring and settle down in St. Louis, where he led a quiet lifeof composing and teaching. By 1907, however, marital troublesand the failure of his newer, more sophisticated rags to equal thepopularity of his earlier works forced him back on the road.

In 1909, Joplin remarried and settled in New York, where heproduced some of his finest rags and began work on an opera,Treemonisha. Before long, the project came to absorb all hisenergies, virtually spelling the end of his ragtime composition.A failed attempt in 1915 to win support for Treemonisha proveda disastrous psychic blow from which Joplin never recovered. Hehad contracted syphilis as a young man, and the obsessive workon the opera had already begun to speed his mental deterioration.His quiet, level temperament become unpredictable, his behaviourtense, suspicious, increasingly moody. His wife and friendsultimately had no choice but to commit him to an institution,and he died there in 1917.

The sensitive, introspective features revealed by portraits of ScottJoplin perfectly reflect the character of his music. A deep sense oflyricism infuses his work, and even at his most high-spirited hecannot repress a hint of melancholy. Accounts of his piano-playingstress his smooth legato, singing tone, and subtle control of rhythm.He had little in common with the fast and flashy school of ragtimethat grew up after him; several of his pieces bear the admonition“Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ‘Ragtime’ fast.”In Joplin’s hands, the flowing syncopated treble and steady basstypical of ragtime take on rare suppleness; he turns the lowestvoice from a simple chordal support into a finely patterned line,

and the upper parts into delicate contrapuntal filigree. The latepieces above all revel in unexpected shifts of harmony and texture;but at all stages of his career, Joplin remains guided by a singleideal: the creation of a truly classic ragtime.

Joshua Rifkin

Joshua RifkinJoshua Rifkin’s life in music has spannedRenaissance motets and ragtime masters,Bach cantatas and Baroque Beatles. Hehas conducted and appeared as soloistwith leading orchestras and early musicgroups in Europe, the US, Japan, Australia,and Israel in music ranging from Bach,Haydn, and Beethoven to Stravinsky,Copland, and the newest moderns. TheBach Ensemble, which he founded in

1978, won the Gramophone Award for its recording of the Mass inB Minor and has performed this and many other works of Bach atfestivals in the United States, Europe, and beyond. The University ofDortmund, Germany, and the Academy of Music in Kraków, Poland,have awarded him honorary doctorates for his contributions to Bachinterpretation, and the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Germanyhas awarded him the Lichtenberg Medallion, its highest honour.

Joshua Rifkin’s recordings of Scott Joplin spearheaded the rediscoveryof this fundamental American composer, and he has since playedJoplin’s music in major concert halls throughout the world, at theProms in Hyde Park, and at the White House in Washington DC.His CD Rags and Tangos introduced many listeners to the works ofJoplin’s great Brazilian contemporary Ernesto Nazareth; broadcastperformances in Europe have counterpointed Joplin with Bach andwith Chopin. His latest CD, the award-winning Vivat Leo! Musicfor a Medici Pope with the Dutch-based vocal ensemble CappellaPratensis (Challenge Classics), has returned him for the first time inmany years to the music of the Renaissance. Projects on the horizoninclude performances of Monteverdi’s Vespers in the US and Belgium,and music of the older Bach family with the Bach Ensemble andthe recent Gramophone Award winners Vox luminis at the festivalBach:Sommer in Arnstadt, Germany.